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The purpose of this study was to gain a greater understanding of potential challenges from a moral stress perspective that Swedish military leaders can face when implementing autonomous weapons systems. Two questions were asked to investigate this: what demands may arise and how can leaders be impacted? The study was conducted as a literature study and data from nine peer reviewed articles and a research report from the Swedish Defense Research Institute were analyzed via thematic analysis. The result seems to show that the lack of control, the lack of trust and difficulty in demanding responsibility from an autonomous weapon system creates moral leadership challenges. Without control over the autonomous weapon system, the consequences of its actions risk going against the leader's moral and this creates problems with how leadership can and should be conducted. The study also seems to show that autonomous weapon systems can lead to a moral impact on leaders, since autonomous weapon systems risk leading to increased distancing and risking contributing to increased violence. Given the moral leadership challenges and the moral influence made visible in this study, there seems to be a great risk of moral stress and even moral injury if autonomous weapon systems are used for actions that go against the leader's morality.

This thesis addresses developments in Artificial Intelligence and the increasing trend of robotization and autonomization of military forces in the context of Revolution in Military Affairs. It examines and categorizes different approaches to concepts of AI, autonomy and RMA in the public debate and academic and military literature. It further explores potential impacts and challenges of AI and its weaponized subset - Autonomous Weapon Systems on civil-military relations, legal and ethical norms, arms control regime and general security domain. Building upon findings from previous chapters, AI and AWSs are analyzed in a context of RMA and broader socio-economic context. Specifically, AI-enabled autonomy is compared with aspects of existing remotely controlled systems. The thesis comes to a conclusion that AWSs are harbingers of the next RMA and AI has the potential to match the importance of Neolithic, Industrial and Information revolution.

The thesis has aimed to study the emergence of a new weapons technology, also known as ‘killer robots’ or lethal autonomous weapon system. It seeks to answer what factors drive the development and deployment of this weapon system without ‘meaningful human control’, a component that allows the decision to kill to be delegated to machines. The research question focuses on seeking the motivations to develop and deploy LAWS, as well as the consequences this would have on military conduct and conflict characteristics.The incentives they bring up and the way of adopting them has been studied by synthesizing antinomic democratic peace theory and adoption capacity theory respectively. The findings of this qualitative content analysis lead to two major conclusions. (1) That LAWS present severe risk avoidance and costs reduction potential for the user. These factors have a more prevalent pull on democracies than autocracies, since they stand to benefit from LAWS’ specific capabilities more in comparison. (2) That their adoption is aided by low financial intensity needed to adopt it, due to the high commercial profitability and applicability of AI technology, and the ease of a spillover to military sphere. Their adoption is hindered by high organizational capital needed to implement the drastic changes LAWS bring. All of this leads to the prediction that LAWS are likely to proliferate further, at a medium speed, and potentially upset the balance of power.